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UnionPay at Davos 2026: China's Economic Resilience Demonstrated

UnionPay was recently invited to attend the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), commonly referred to as Winter Davos, held in Switzerland. On January 21, Dong Junfeng, the Director of UnionPay, took part in a panel discussion titled "Is the Chinese Economy Fully Developed?" During this roundtable, Dong engaged with other participants on key topics concerning the trends of China's economic development, innovation-driven growth, and China's contributions to the global economy.

The dialogue emphasized the strong resilience and growth potential of the Chinese economy, showcasing UnionPay's crucial role in supporting domestic economic circulation, stimulating new high-quality productive forces, and promoting global economic cooperation.

The Resilience of the Chinese Economy

Amid escalating global economic risks and challenges, resilience remains a defining characteristic of the Chinese economy. In 2025, China experienced a year-over-year GDP growth of 5%, with a total valuation surpassing 140 trillion yuan. Dong attributed this long-term stability and sustainable growth to several positive factors, including effective government planning and leadership, increased market vitality, improved consumption levels, and rising domestic demand, with the latter two being particularly significant.

At the policy level, China continues to promote a new development paradigm that strengthens both domestic and international circulations. The Fifteenth Five-Year Plan specifically outlines initiatives aimed at boosting consumption and expanding the availability of high-quality consumer products and services, which provide a foundational guarantee for sustainable economic growth.

Shifting Consumption Trends

Emerging trends in consumption, innovative business models, and new use cases are rapidly developing. Data from UnionPay indicates a stable increase in digital payments within the Chinese consumer sector. New models, such as live-streaming e-commerce, cross-border e-commerce, instant retail, and the sharing economy, are gaining substantial traction. Expenditures on winter sports and tourism have surged by over 50%, while cross-border payments have seen steady growth with foreign tourist spending rising over 60%. These trends suggest a shift in household consumption away from traditional goods towards diversified, high-quality, and intelligent use cases.

This structural change in consumer spending is transforming the driving forces behind economic growth, where consumption is fueled by both products and services instead of merely products. Consequently, the focus has shifted towards light and customized manufacturing, accelerating innovation in product offerings.

In alignment with these trends, UnionPay is leveraging its strengths in payment systems to contribute to the expansion of the consumer market in terms of both volume and quality through technological innovations and service enhancements.

The company has established a payment network that spans both online and physical stores in domestic and international markets, optimizing payment experiences and reducing transaction costs. These efforts have effectively unlocked spending potential and provided robust support for enhancing business vitality, positioning UnionPay as a pivotal accelerator of China's ongoing economic growth.

UnionPay and Artificial Intelligence

UnionPay is actively developing an ecosystem centered around artificial intelligence (AI) as a key driver of productivity and sustainable economic growth. Dong noted that the global AI boom in recent years has led to breakthroughs in large language models, multimodal technologies, and intelligent agents, hastening broad AI adoption.

Through improving efficiencies, optimizing models, and transforming ecosystems, AI unleashes new quality-driven productive forces, becoming a disruptive engine for economic growth, especially in the payments sector.

In terms of efficiency enhancement, AI contributes to cost reduction and increased personal productivity, corporate operations, industry collaborations, and decision-making by automating repetitive tasks and optimizing decision processes. UnionPay has developed an intelligent risk management system for payments, where AI-supported risk management rules form a solid defense for the secure and compliant advancement of digital payments.

Additionally, UnionPay has launched the